The Disobedient Museum

Writing at the Edge

Kylie Message

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315294117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge aims to motivate disciplinary thinking to reimagine writing about museums as an activity where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced, and to theorize this process as a form of protest against disciplinary stagnation.Drawing on a range of cultural, theoretical, and political approaches, Kylie Message examines potential links between methods of critique today and moments of historical and disciplinary crisis, and asks what contribution museums might make to these, either as direct actors or through activities that sit more comfortably within their institutional remit. Identifying the process of writing about museums as a form of activism, that brings together and elaborates on cultural and political agendas for change, the book explores how a process of engaged critique might benefit museum studies, what this critique might look like, and how museum studies might make a contribution to discourses of social and political change. The Disobedient Museum is the first volume in Routledge's innovative 'Museums in Focus' series and will be of great interest to scholars and students in the fields of Museum, Heritage, Public History, and Cultural Studies. It should also be essential reading for museum practitioners, particularly those engaged with questions about the role of museums in regard to social activism and contentious contemporary challenges.

1
Political protest

Figure 1.1 Person wearing ‘I can see November from my House too!’ sticker at Restoring Honor rally, National Mall, Washington, D.C., August 28, 2010

Photograph by Kylie Message.

This photo has been haunting me. I took it on August 28, 2010, at the Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial, the same location that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the 1963 March on Washington, 47 years earlier to the day. Although it is one of hundreds of photographs I took that day, this is the image that stuck in my mind.¹

The Restoring Honor rally was organized by Glenn Beck, a provocative and famously right-wing Fox News personality aligned with former Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. Although Beck had declared the event to be a ‘nonpolitical’ gathering for American patriots wanting to demand that faith and honor be restored to American government (Halloran 2010), he also claimed that its primary aim was to ‘reclaim the civil rights movement’ (Beck 2010a; Beck 2010b; Milbank 2010; Rich 2010). There was, however, little confusion about the ideological leaning of the event among the many thousands of participants and flag wavers at the Restoring Honor rally, many of whom brandished Tea Party slogans and insignia.² Signs of ambiguity were similarly absent among the smaller numbers attending the Reclaim the Dream march, organized by Al Sharpton and held later that day at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial construction site. Beck had reportedly scheduled his rally ‘coincidentally’, without being aware of the significance of the day. Unable to use the iconic Lincoln Memorial, the Sharpton-led march instead moved from Dunbar High School (the first high school for black students in the Washington, D.C. area) to the site of the almost completed Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, close to the Jefferson Memorial. According to one media report, ‘Tens of thousands descended on Washington today for one of the biggest culture clashes in decades – one that pitted an almost exclusively white crowd against one that was predominantly African-American. Both claimed the legacy of Martin Luther King’ (MacAskill 2010).

Beck’s appropriation of the language of the Civil Rights movement to serve the interests of a conservative and disaffected, predominantly white middle-class cohort undoubtedly contributed to the right-wing populism of the Tea Party rally. Criticized by some for ‘hijacking’ the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., he argued a connection between the Civil Rights movement (that would be more logically linked to the progressive populism of the Occupy movement that emerged the following year) and a white moral panic more commonly associated with the 1773 Boston Tea Party protest against taxation without representation. The latter genealogy is represented widely in familiar Tea Party slogans, such as ‘Silent Majority No More!’, ‘Don’t Tread on Me’, ‘Taxed Enough Already’, and ‘Don’t Spread the Wealth; Spread My Work Ethic’. Beck’s language also tapped into a backlash against political correctness, a perception that despite President Barack Obama’s inclusive rhetoric, the white middle-lower-class American mainstream was being overlooked. The Tea Party rhetoric can be understood as reflecting an ‘I want to matter too’ mentality. Critical cultural theorist Lauren Berlant contends that this rhetoric articulates a feeling of exclusion:

I want my friends, my group, to matter. Who matters? Why should group x [for example, Black Lives Matter] matter more, or first, or get more attention? It’s hard for the formerly optimistic and unmarked whites to feel right about other people mattering before they do, because they didn’t know that their freedom was bought on the backs of other people’s exploitation and exile from protection by the law. They thought their freedom was their property, constitutionally.

(Berlant 2016)

Although a clear affront to many social justice and civil rights advocates and activists, Beck’s approach to defending what he perceived to be the ‘real’ majority against the powerful elites and vocal interest groups that control the political system was taken from an artillery more commonly associated with left-wing causes (Lassiter 2011). It can be seen as a direct inversion of cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall’s advice for the political left to make use of liberal institutions and ideas in order to redirect them to its own purposes (in Robbins 2016). By appropriating the language of economic equality as a universal right for ‘all’ Americans, Beck offered a kind of privilege or exceptionalism by association for those attendees at the rally who had, following a speech by President Richard Nixon in 1969, come to identify as the ‘great silent majority’ (Nixon 1969). Instead of inventing new political and cultural terms of opposition, Beck co-opted contemporary (and often liberal) norms that already existed. In so doing, he also denied or at least raised questions about the ‘naturalness’ of any genealogical links between the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches with the parallel Reclaim the Dream march organized by Al Sharpton.

The politics on display that day were elaborate and antagonistic or defensive, and the imagery on the no-tax, no-big-government, no-health-care, ‘no-bama’ posters, banners, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia followed suit. The homogeneity of visual messaging evident in most of my photographs from the day is consistent with Walter Benjamin’s observation that the real work of commentary and politics occurs not with evidence presented by the image itself but with the subsequent process of captioning, framing, and ‘naming’ its significance (Benjamin 1997). Berlant agrees with Benjamin’s analysis, saying: ‘It is as though the aim of a collective political event has to involve converging on a caption that converts [the photograph of] a historical moment into an iconic event preserved from history’s contingencies, people’s memories, and ambivalence’ (Berlant and Greenwald 2012: 73). Beck was certainly aware of the impact of ‘naming’ the significance of the event, as was demonstrated in his subsequent media statements about the National Museum of American History’s solicitation of materials from the rally for its the national collections, an exchange that he duly reported as an endorsement of his political position (Beck 2010c; Groer 2010; for a detailed discussion of Beck’s claims about the museum’s interest, see Message 2014, 2017). The symbolic ‘universe’ created by the elaborate staging of the event – that, importantly, was reproduced in most photographs published in media reports – created the impression that, unlike the participants wielding racist anti-Obama slogans, Beck’s message was a middle-of-the-road one.

The ‘I can see November from my House too!’ sticker is part of the symbolic universe created by the rally.³ As the image shows, the sticker and person wearing it offer an impression of moderation that in a ‘normal’ context might appear extreme but that, in the landscape created by the Tea Party rally, came across as reasonable, thereby imbuing Beck with a credibility that would be less likely to alienate middle America. Obama also knew how to mobilize the center to achieve this effect (and sway swing voters), a point explained in 2010 by political commentator, Tom Hayden, who says that while the president had typically been criticized for being too right leaning for most progressives, he required ‘the existence of a disappointed left as proof that he commands the center’ (Hayden 2011: 267). Beck’s image of reasonableness followed this strategy of appealing to the middle ground and was, as such, produced as much through its contrast with the extremist slogans (‘America: Love it or go back to Kenya’) represented by some staunch anti-Obama Tea Party members as it was by its opposition to Obama’s ‘liberal’ views. In other words, while the ‘I can see November from my House too!’ sticker was sedate in comparison to the ostentatious visual gestures evident that day, it provided a like signifier for Beck’s middle-of-the-road messaging that further normalized his rhetoric by producing the effect of a political continuum in which Beck was placed centrally.

In her writing on activism, American author Rebecca Solnit argues that full engagement by political activists (which includes the potential to mobilize others) requires the ability to work across ideological divisions, to occupy a slippery position of discursive as well as ideological liminality. Although Solnit (2006) was writing about progressive (left-wing) rather than conservative (right-wing) political activism, this is the approach used by Beck in his attempted recuperation of the language of Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond the obvious currency to be gained by an association (however real) with the Civil Rights movement, his appropriation of the language ‘of the left’ was a powerful tactic for demonstrating the value of refusing, rejecting, or blurring ideological picket lines. It allowed Beck to occupy a liminal space where he could speak directly to people who identified with a variety of positions across the political spectrum. In appearing to take an approach that was inclusive of people of varying degrees of commitment, from moderate to extreme, the Tea Party at that moment succeeded in building a sense of movement – or alliance building. Obama’s own approach to lobbying throughout his election campaigns was likely also an influence on this process. In appealing to people to act like ‘the people’, said Berlant (2011: 238), Obama encouraged Americans to be politically engaged citizens involved in activities such as voting and demonstrating. He sought, said Berlant, to incite people to act ‘as if their activism would bring about a change that was bigger than their new attachment to activism or to him’ (Berlant 2011: 238). Obama’s encouragement of active citizenship influenced conservatives such as Beck and further fueled the growing backlash by ‘the left (people identified as anti-war, anti-class inequality, anti-racist, antihomophobic, antimisogynistic)’ against Obama on the grounds that he was a ‘neo-liberal market man without any left bona fides’ (Berlant 2011: 238). While some elements of this backlash were manifested by the Occupy movement a short time later, the backlash was criticized by Solnit and others on the grounds that it alienated people who were not radical enough, including those who continued to support Obama, even if in a measured form (Solnit 2012).

Framing optimism

I attended the Restoring Honor and Reclaim the Dream events in 2010 to collect data for a book I was writing about museums and social activism (Message 2014). I had commenced working on the book sometime after Obama made his ‘Audacity of Hope’ speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention (Obama 2004) but prior to the presidential campaign of 2008,⁴ and it was completed a couple of years after the Tea Party rally. The book’s content covered a period from the late 1950s through to 2013, and investigated interactions between social justice movements and museums in the United States, focusing specifically on the Smithsonian Institution from the era of the National Museum of American History’s establishment and burgeoning Civil Rights movement and including the early days of tribal Native American activism as it pertained to regional cultural center development. My initial aim for the book was to map a chronology of activism-based interactions between national museums and the public sphere across several decades. However, the process also led to an unintended outcome of profiling a period of optimism in public and political culture in the United States (vis-à-vis this lens of cultural politics/museum activism) that characterized the roughly seven-year writing period.

This seven-year period has been identified by many people – from Obama through to Beck (in his Restoring Honor speech, Beck 2010d) – as one of hope or optimism, partly, it might be suggested, due to a collective desire for it to be so. This desire to feel – or demand – inclusion and representation within and connection to political narratives reflected a contrast with the immediately preceding period, which Solnit characterized as one of tremendous despair and helplessness caused by the Bush administration in the United States and the outset of the war in Iraq (Solnit 2016a: 19). The social optimism of the period was spearheaded by Obama’s campaign of hope. His presidency consolidated decades of activism and contributed to the political, financial, and legislative changes required to start the process of making reparations for past injustices. Reparations included a commitment to supporting the building of ‘agenda-based’ or ‘identity-focused’ museums including the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened with celebration and fanfare in 2004, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which finally came to fruition in late 2016, many decades after a complex lobbying and development process (Message 2014; Taylor 2011). New national museums do not come cheap, and they are always hard-won politically, so the bookending of this period by these and other similarly significant museum developments (including tribal cultural centers) indicates the existence of high levels of political confidence at that time.

It would be naïve to suggest that this period was universally optimistic. Political confidence produced out of change (of government, for example) can be a useful salve, a distraction from ongoing inequality. Causes for despair as well as for hope continued to coexist following the election of the first African American U.S. president, and it would be equally incorrect to assert that any political party or persuasion enjoyed any form of consensus homogeneity or bulletproof longevity. Support for Obama, even among his traditional base, had waned by 2010, with some conceding that his presidential performance was ‘now about the politics of the less bad’ (Berlant and Greenwald 2012: 80). Solnit shares this view, cautioning that although the ‘bad old days’ (of the Bush presidency, for instance) had passed, ‘despair, defeatism, cynicism and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed’ (Solnit 2016b). This statement also shows that despair is often an accompaniment if not a precondition for optimism. Instead of existing on a binary scale (for example, we are happy or sad, included or excluded), hope (or optimism) exists as – an often partial – measure of both. Solnit illustrates this point by arguing that optimism (or what she prefers to call ‘hope’) does not mean ignoring the moments of despair. It means ‘remembering what else the twenty-first century has brought, including the movements, heroes and shifts in consciousness that address these things now’. This has, she says, ‘been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change and deep shifts in ideas, perspective and frameworks for large parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things)’ (Solnit 2016b).

In contrast to Solnit’s use of hope as a linguistic framework through which to engage with the complexities of the current era, Berlant’s assessment is bleaker. She argues that our current political fascinations (with Obama or Beck or Trump or whoever else) are symptomatic of what she calls ‘cruel optimism’. A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. We desire, for example, political change, so we attend rallies and marches, campaign on behalf of our preferred candidates, and vote at elections (we exercise our obligations and rights as engaged citizens, as Obama appealed for us to do). However, instead of delivering the outcome we actually want (change), our actions reinforce the structural order and preexisting political and economic conditions that preclude real change from being made.⁵ Whether our preferred candidate or cause is successful or not makes no difference to these structural conditions. What is cruel, then, about contemporary life is our commitment to grinding away at it, hoping that as long as we do everything ‘right’, things will get better. In contrast to Solnit’s insistence on the ‘extraordinariness’ and transformations of the current period (Solnit 2016a), Berlant (2011) sees it as being marked by bad faith attachments and the resulting ‘ordinariness’ of crisis. Instead of working to overcome crisis, the attachments that we have to ‘good life’ fantasies (our optimism, for example, that a good life can be realized by mainstream political participation) further fuel an impasse such that, rather than being extraordinary, crisis is a constant and ordinary feature of the historical present, as a period and a concept that moves across individual, collective, and political life.

Berlant’s commitment to critique works to identify situations where individuals are not impassive, where they develop strategies for survival and modes of adjustment for getting by, even when the norms and conventions associated with obtaining a good life are no longer available or effective. Key to her argument (and relevant to my aims in the context of this book) is a focus on the ways that new forms, genres, sites, and strategies for navigating situations of overwhelming incoherence and precariousness can also create new sites of action. Rather than embodying direct opposition (which arguably implies acceptance of the authority of the term you might be ostensibly seeking to critique), the sites of action/acts of resistance that Berlant is interested in are often liminal and do not typically constitute singular instances of binary oppositions or antinomies (Berlant 2016, 2011). They are instead multiple, mobile, and transitory, and, importantly, they remain connected to dichotomized terms or positions, as demonstrated by Beck’s subversion of the tactics of resistance usually associated with the political left on the one hand and by his pretensions to centrality and reasonableness on the other hand.

While the projects of Berlant and Solnit may appear contradictory at the outset, they come together in their aims and in some cases the structure they use to make their cases.⁶ Both understand, for example, that achieving transformation requires a change in the means of production as well as in the ways we think and act in relation to the norms and conventions, as well as in their resulting outcomes or objects, and both use the example of narrative genre and storytelling to make this point.⁷ Both are committed to methodological innovation and outcomes and recognize a point central also to the basic premise of the Museums in Focus book series, that ‘A Good Account of a Problem Predicts Absolutely Nothing About the Value of a Solution’ (Berlant 2016). Perhaps more than anything else, both Solnit and Berlant understand the importance of their work as being fundamentally about changing the conditions, the encounter, and the experience of meaning production with attention to the art of critical engagement and writing.

Why museums

Fast-forward another seven years from the Restoring Honor and Reclaim the Dream rallies to 2017, where we witness the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States of Ame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series preface
• Acknowledgments
• This is not a protest. This is a process
• 1 Political protest
• 2 Disciplinary crisis
• 3 Writing resistance
• Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns
• Bibliography
• Index